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AP Photo/Butch Dill Senator Luther Strange speaks to supporters as he concedes the Republican primary runoff for U.S. Senate to Roy Moore in Homewood, Alabama. democracy_rules.jpg T here are lots of explanations for why Republicans have backed themselves into a corner both legislatively and politically, unable to either enact an agenda or to contain a populist uprising that now poses as great a threat to GOP incumbents as it does to Democrats. The most obvious issue is that the GOP’s intransigence, anti-government attacks, and culture wars have unleashed a monster that Republicans can no longer control. But another, less apparent, problem that helps explain the GOP’s vicious cycle of paralysis and unpopularity has to do with big money. As the champions of campaign-finance deregulation and unrestricted corporate spending, Republicans on Capitol Hill are now more in tune with their billionaire conservative donors than with the average GOP voters who rallied behind Trump. This shows up...

AP Photo/Noah Berger Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks in San Jose, California democracy_rules.jpg F acebook’s disclosure that it sold up to $150,000 in ads to Russia-based social media trolls during the 2016 election has revived a potentially explosive debate over whether the government should regulate political ads on the internet. Lawmakers mulling new regulations are sure to get an earful from both free speech advocates and foes of secret spending. Just this week, House and Senate Democrats urged the Federal Election Commission to “promulgate new guidance” on how ad platforms can better prevent illegal foreign spending. But most everybody agrees on one thing: Facebook has been shirking its public responsibilities, even as its power and revenues mushroom. Facebook has partially mitigated the damage by announcing that it would release 3,000 ads to government investigators. “I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in remarks...

AP Photo/Holly Ramer Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner at a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity on September 12, 2017, in Manchester, New Hampshire. democracy_rules.jpg C onservatives who have long stoked the myth of widespread voter fraud are discovering what happens when you get a national platform for your conspiracy theories: The house of cards starts to collapse. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach won a megaphone for his disputed voter fraud theories as vice chairman of President Trump’s “election integrity” commission, but he was forced to eat crow at the panel’s second public meeting Tuesday in New Hampshire. Having claimed in a Breitbart column that New Hampshire’s Senate race “was stolen through voter fraud,” Kobach faced such a torrent of evidence to the contrary that he publicly equivocated, wondering aloud “if it’s even possible to condense what is really a complex legal issue into...

(Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP) Republican Senators Cory Gardner, John Barrasso, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, John Thune, and Majority Whip John Cornyn on September 6, 2017 democracy_rules.jpg T he Republican Party has now officially abandoned Latinos. It’s not clear how much of a political price Republicans will pay for this, but we may find out as early as next year, when midterms may coincide with a GOP-authored mass deportation. Sure, there are Republicans who want to find a legislative fix during the six-month window that President Trump has given Congress to act before he yanks legal protections from 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. These “Dreamers” have been working and studying here legally since 2012 under President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But who really believes that this GOP-controlled Congress can enact a bill to save DACA by this spring? Republicans have killed or blocked immigration legislation...

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite Special Counsel Robert Mueller departs the Capitol after a closed-door meeting with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee about Russian meddling in the election and possible connection to the Trump campaign, in Washington, Wednesday, June 21, 2017. democracy_rules.jpg A midst floods, nuclear threats, and white nationalist violence, the latest disclosures from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election would be easy to overlook. But the news that Trump allies last year sought the Kremlin’s help with a Moscow real-estate deal, and voiced hopes that it would boost his presidential campaign, moves the Russia scandal into new territory. Trump’s most hard-core loyalists may not care, but the broader GOP electorate is starting to pay attention, and that should worry Republicans facing midterm elections next year. Russia is not the only factor fueling GOP unease, but there’s evidence that Mueller’s investigation is...